by Josh Lanyon
“If the drug’s not in her body, the autopsy won’t tell them much. And I can hear the defense already arguing that the injection mark was a mosquito bite.”
I grinned. “I see. So, I’m your insurance policy?”
“Yep.” Nedda smiled too, faintly. “You’re smart and sensible and, other than the fact that you’ve got men panting after you, seem pretty good at avoiding drama.”
I felt myself turning red. “Not really,” I said uncomfortably. “This is the first time—”
“Really,” she said firmly. “Three men on this trip were falling over themselves to get to you. It was embarrassing to watch. Anyway, my point is people talk to you. I think if we keep our eyes and ears open...”
She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t have to. I believed everything Nedda said. Well, not about men panting after me. The sudden jump in my IT factor was confusing—not to mention a fluke. But Nedda was worried and uneasy, absolutely, and she thought it was a good idea to share her suspicions with someone not personally connected to her. Also, Nedda was, like me, a mystery fan, and she just couldn’t help thinking like an amateur sleuth.
“Okay,” I said. “Eyes and ears open. But, Nedda? No snooping. No asking questions or raising hypotheticals. You’re already on someone’s radar. Don’t give them any reason to worry about you.”
“No, of course not. Wally said the same thing.”
“Wally’s right. Anyway, the rest of them will ask all the questions without any prompting from us. We just need to listen to the answers.”
“True.” She sighed. “Right. Well, I’ll let you get some sleep.”
I saw her to the door and watched her down the shadowy hall to her own room. She knocked and Wally practically snatched her inside.
I locked my door and returned to lying on my bed, staring up at the beady-eyed raven.
I can’t say my thoughts were particularly incisive. I was still worried about John. I was alarmed by Nedda’s news. She was right, of course. Vanessa had lived a long and controversial life. There might be any number of people who believed they had cause to dislike, even hate her. There was a reason that even on this tiny, remote Scottish island she had installed double deadbolts on her fortress-like bedroom door.
I couldn’t help thinking that the reason was Donald Kresley.
Sure, Vanessa could have been dispatched by a deranged vigilante type. I didn’t like that idea because that was the argument that might be made against John. But more to the point, even if something like that might work in a book, it was really hard to believe anyone in real life would go to this much trouble and expense—to plan an execution motivated by principle alone for years.
Years.
No.
This murder wasn’t random or on impulse. Someone had plotted and planned—and invested a pretty penny—in order to come on this trip to kill Vanessa Rayburn. That alone spoke to a killer driven by deeply personal motives.
And that brought us—well, me—back to poor young Donald Kresley.
I knew where Nedda was coming from. In a mystery novel, the Kresley connection was too linear. Too obvious. Too simple. The salmon farm manager had it in for Vanessa for reasons unknown. Her long lost twin sister was out to take over her fortune. In fiction there would have to be another obscure and surprising reason for Vanessa’s death. But thanks to all those hours spent watching Homicide Hunter and Unusual Suspects and The Perfect Murder with Trevor, I knew only too well that in real life homicide, eight times out of ten the most obvious suspect was, indeed, the perp.
How boring was that? No wonder police got jaded.
No way in hell was I going to do any sleeping that night. What I wanted to do was sit down at my desk and get to work.
It didn’t make for great crime fiction, but nowadays a big part of detective work was done online. Not in John’s case, obviously, but my mean streets were the URLs of the internet.
However, listening to the wind howl outside those diamond-paned windows, I knew there would be no sleuthing that night. No sleuthing until the weather cleared and power—
I sat up.
What in God’s name was I thinking? The internet? There was an entire library downstairs stuffed with reference books on everything under the sun, including the life and crimes of Dame Vanessa Rayburn.
I went to the door, opened it and listened. Though the hall was in complete darkness, I could hear the buzz of voices.
Everyone was still awake. Still talking.
I would have to wait. I blew out my candle and felt my way across the room to sit beside the window.
The minutes ticked by. Then the hours. I was too tense. Too nervous to fall asleep. I was pretty sure no one was paying attention to me, but I’d have to be stupid not to recognize that there was a tiny element of risk. If I was having trouble sleeping, surely the person who had killed Vanessa would be even more keyed up.
As all mystery readers know, the second murder is very often motivated by fear of exposure and a guilty conscience.
It was just after one a.m. when I relit my taper, eased my door open again and listened intently. To my relief a heavy, exhausted silence met my ears. Mostly. Snores drifted from across the hall where the Poe sisters slept. Snores floated from down the hall where the Matsukados rested.
Good.
I slipped silently into the hall, softly closing my door, and crept down the staircase. The shadows thrown by the candle crouched over me menacingly, then melted into the corners. Last night seemed a lifetime since John and I had sneaked down the winding staircase, hurrying to catch his flight.
There was no hurrying this night. The light from my candle didn’t radiate far, and the steps were steep.
When I reached the library, the doors were closed, and for one awful moment, I thought they were locked. It turned out the handle was stuck and the right door swung silently open.
Closing the door behind me, I felt my way down the length of the room, nearly falling over a chair and then almost knocking a lamp off a table. The rain splashed against the window. The room smelled of old books and old rugs. It smelled like home.
About halfway down the long room, I found a flashlight that Hamish had been carrying earlier. The yellow beam threw a feeble, faded light over the old rugs and towering shelves.
I walked along the shelves until I found the true crime section again, and then began to pull out the books that I knew related to the Kresley killing.
Carrying a stack over to one of the long dark library tables, I began to read.
I had been over nearly all these accounts before. I knew Davidson’s Suspicious Circumstances and Wyecliff’s The Good Girl were the most sensational—and the most popular—but contained the most factual errors—or at least had received the most challenges to their research. The other three, Murder in Sussex, A Walk in the Woods and There Grows an Oak were considered the most comprehensive and complete accounts of both the crime and investigation. There Grows an Oak had won the Man Booker Prize for nonfiction.
I started with Murder in Sussex, refreshing myself with the details of the case. Forty-some years ago, fifteen-year-old Claire Sims had invited her classmate and sometimes boyfriend Donald Kresley to come for a walk in the woods not so far from Ashdown Forest, which had inspired the Hundred Acre Wood in the Winnie the Pooh books. It had been autumn, October. A cold, dreary Friday afternoon.
It was October now. Was that significant? I made a note.
Claire had come home three hours later, wet and muddy and sullen. Donald had never come home.
Kresley’s parents were not alarmed until bedtime came and there was still no sign of Donald. After all, he was sixteen and a responsible kid with many extracurricular activities, including a girlfriend.
Even when they began making phone calls to Donald’s friends, they weren’t really expecting bad news. Even responsible kids
forgot to phone home once in a while.
By the next morning though, fear had set in and they had gone to the police. The fear had been focused on traffic accidents, that kind of thing. No one expected the worst.
And, in fact, it was three days later before the worst was discovered.
Initially, there had been some idea of accidental death. Maybe Donald had slipped in the stream, knocked himself out on a rock, and drowned.
But once the pathologists got involved, it was clear the kid had been hit from behind. Further, the body appeared to have been dragged some little distance and placed in the stream. He had died by drowning,
During the first round of questioning, Donald’s girlfriend and all his friends denied knowing he had gone to the woods—let alone why. The ever-popular theory of murder by passing tramp was floated, but eventually discarded.
During the second round of questioning, Donald’s friends had still denied knowing any reason for his going into the woods, but an obvious reason for a teenage boy to be in the woods would surely be a teenage girl. Or to get high. Or another teenage boy. But in Donald’s case, best guess was a girl.
Donald’s girlfriend had been questioned but she had insisted she had not been with him.
The investigation had moved on, but by virtue of there being no other suspects or motives (he had not been robbed or otherwise assaulted), eventually attention had returned to the girl.
Under questioning, Claire broke down and admitted she had killed him, although there was no clear motive then or really ever.
I made a few notes. Most of the book focused on the trial of Claire Sims and legal ramifications. Kresley’s parents had been enraged that Claire had not been sentenced to life in prison. They would probably have gone for the death penalty had it still been an option. But they were no longer living and there was no mention of any siblings, so there went an obvious angle. Not that extended family can’t be moved to vengeance, but that’s more for LA street gangs and Scottish clans. The Kresleys were nice middleclass English folk.
I moved on to A Walk in the Woods. It was very much the same account, but offered more photos. It was depressing and poignant to see how very young Kresley had been—and equally depressing and poignant to see how young Vanessa had been.
By then I had been reading for a couple of hours and the lack of sleep from the night before was catching up to me. I yawned over the pages of photos, distracted by how much Elizabeth Ogilvie resembled Mrs. Kresley.
Next up was There Grows an Oak. Essentially the same account, though approached more lyrically and tragically, and with a lot more photos. The photo where Mrs. Kresley resembled Elizabeth Ogilvie was not included, but in scanning the pictures of Donald and his classmates, I came across a photo captioned Kresley’s girlfriend Evie Waters.
I frowned, trying to make sense of it. Evie Waters was a thin, sharp-faced girl with black hair. She was not Claire Sims. She was not Vanessa Rayburn. She could never be mistaken for Vanessa in any incarnation.
Who the hell was Evie Waters?
I grabbed Murder in Sussex and reread the passages I’d just been over. I skimmed A Walk in the Woods.
I realized that I had taken it for granted that when these writers referred to Kresley’s girlfriend, they meant Claire. I saw now my mistake—and their mistake too because they had used the term “girlfriend” interchangeably for Claire and Evie.
A new player in the drama opened up a whole new avenue of possibility.
I reached for the books I was least familiar with: Suspicious Circumstances and The Good Girl.
Davidson, the author of Suspicious Circumstances, was as confused by the two-girlfriends angle as I had been, and had missed it entirely. What he did have was a rare family photo of the Kresleys.
I stared at it, feeling my scalp prickle. The rain made shushing sounds against the window.
There had been a sibling. A younger sister by the name of Daya.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was a jolt.
I stared at the photo and it was honestly impossible to tell. She had been one of those pale, skinny anonymous-looking English girls that provide the “also pictured” in hundreds of photos in British biographies and accounts of settling the Empire.
But she was the right age—ten years younger than Donald, which would put her in her late fifties—and the name “Daya” could not be a coincidence. It was not a common name. Too, there was her odd behavior. Her antagonistic attitude toward Vanessa’s work, accepting and then abruptly backing out of the murder game—even her comments that first night at dinner.
The table behind us had been discussing Vanessa’s DBE and someone had said, “I think maybe she was awarded the DBE before the news of her real identity came out.”
And Daya had answered, “No, that’s not correct. I remember the fuss when it was announced. People picketed.”
“That was such a long time ago. Almost thirty years.”
“It doesn’t seem so very long ago to me.”
“Oh, my God,” I muttered. I rose and took a couple of turns around the table. I ran my hands through my hair.
Daya and Roddy were the only two English nationals on the bus. How the hell had we not suspected them?
Correction. No way was Roddy part of any murder plot. That defied belief.
But Daya...
Even when she had hugged Vanessa when we’d arrived at the island. Had that been guilt about what she was planning to do—or an effort to keep Vanessa from recognizing her?
Either way, her weird semi-hysterical behavior from the time we’d reached the island made more sense now. A lot of it probably came down to fear. Fear she would be discovered before she could carry out her plan. Fear she would be caught after carrying out her plan.
Sure, it was all circumstantial, but if I wasn’t on the right track, Daya’s presence on the island was sure one whopping coincidence.
And what a relief because—I could admit it to myself now—I had been afraid that somehow Ben and Yvonne might be involved. Yvonne was such an odd bird, and Ben had seemed so shaken by Vanessa’s death.
But it was okay. Daya was the one we needed to look at.
Daya, who had a strong, solid motive for wanting revenge on Vanessa.
I glanced down at the cover of There Grows an Oak.
My heart paused mid-beat.
I opened the book and flipped back to the photo of Evie.
“Where do you fit in?” I muttered.
The fierce-eyed girl in the photo stared back in challenge.
Evie. Yvonne.
No.
No way.
It was possible though. Whether I liked it or not.
But that raw-boned girl with the wild, dark hair did not look like any woman on this tour. If she looked like anyone... I stared at her photo. Closed my eyes.
I did not want this to be the answer.
But if it was true, we were talking about murder. About cold-blooded, pre-meditated murder.
I picked up the final book, The Good Girl, and began to read.
* * *
The wind died down, and the ghostly voice whispering down the fireplace chimney fell silent. I turned the final pages.
The rain had stopped and the darkness outside the windows was starting to fade when I put The Good Girl down. Wyecliff had a taste for the sensational, even the lurid, but I had to give her her due. She had caught what nearly everyone else had missed.
Sixteen-year-old Donald Kresley had had two girlfriends. Claire Sims had been fifteen. Evie Waters had been fourteen, and her age had been the main reason her existence had been largely covered up by both the prosecution and the defense. Because long before Claire had been brought to trial, it was painfully, embarrassingly obvious that Evie was pregnant with Donald’s baby.
Wyecliff had been unable to trace
what ultimately became of Evie Waters. The family had shipped her off to Australia, but when Evie came of age, she had migrated again—and successfully taken herself off the grid.
From there it was guesswork, but I had a pretty good idea of what had happened next. Evie had come to the States with her baby. She had trained as a veterinarian and had eventually married.
That was as far as I could get without aid of the internet, and frankly, it was as far as I wanted to go. This was something for the authorities.
I closed the final book, tossed it onto the stack, and shoved the stack to the edge of the table. For a time, I stared out the window as the skies grew lighter. Finally, I blew out my guttering candle, put my head on my folded arms and closed my eyes.
* * *
I came awake to the chime of texts flying in, one after another.
I yawned, sat up, stretched, and opening my eyes, found Ben sitting across the table from me.
I sat up so fast, I nearly tipped my chair over. I’d have been startled to find anyone in there with me, but finding Ben was definitely an unpleasant shock.
“Ben,” I said. My voice sounded old and creaky.
His gaze was pinned on the stack of books I’d pushed aside so that I could rest my eyes. After a moment, he turned his red-rimmed gaze to mine. He had looked exhausted the night before. This morning, he looked worse. Hollowed out.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
That could have meant anything, of course, up to and including, I didn’t know you were sleeping in here. I said cautiously, “No?”
“My dad was diagnosed with brain cancer two years ago. I didn’t even know he wasn’t my real father until then. But that’s when everything changed.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I truly was.
My phone chimed again as another text arrived.
Ben said, “She loved him. She took care of him until the day he died. She never complained. Not one word.”